NewScientist | OUR closest cousins' mental agility has been cast into doubt. Chimps seem curiously unable to use their own initiative to gain the best possible reward if this means behaving in a different way to a dominant group member.Lydia Hopper of Georgia State University in Atlanta trained a dominant female chimp to exchange one of two types of token for a chunk of carrot. This female was then housed with five subordinate chimps, and they quickly learned to ape her reward-receiving style. But the rules of the game had changed: now, alongside the carrot-giving first token, the second token was worth a better prize of grapes.
But despite four of the chimps exchanging the second token type for grapes while they were learning to get rewards, they all reverted to only exchanging the first token type for carrots- the method the dominant chimp used throughout the experiment (Animal Behaviour, DOI: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2011.03.002).
Hopper is not convinced that this behaviour means that chimps are less clever than we thought. "Copying what a dominant group member does could help the chimps to maintain alliances," she says, much like the way humans follow fashion trends.
This research answers those of us who have wondered why some people who benefit from gov't health care also run around crying "Get Gov. Healthcare off my back". Both the chimps, and the people crying "Get Gov. Healthcare off my back," are driven by the phenomena we call "pecking order" "dominance" "social hierarchy" etc. I think we resist observing evidence of subservience because it casts a shadow over our foolish but irresistible notion that we are individuals with a free will. Hopper delicately suggests that the chimps changed their actions to "maintain alliances." Maintaining alliances sounds a bit like clever decision-making - evidence, I suggest, that Hopper is driven by an emotional preference for this less-likely but more comfortable explanation. A major reason Capitalism won and Socialism lost is that Socialism proposed that humans act in a kind and rational fashion. People who consider themselves rational often refuse to even acknowledge their own irrationality. Meanwhile, Capitalism funneled the whole gamut of human motivations into a mean spirited, but very successful social order.
"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool." ~ Feynman
